Rocket Report: Tons of new boosters, SpaceX soars, New Glenn may be late

Welcome to Edition 1.12 of the Rocket Report! This week we have all kinds of stories about small rockets, the scoop on a Texas rocket company back from the dead, and some commercial crew launch dates that we may believe. Or maybe not.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don’t want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

New report quantifies surge in small rockets. In an updated report on the state of the small-satellite launch industry, Carlos Niederstrasser quantifies the increase in potential small launch vehicle contenders, defined as rockets capable of carrying up to 1000kg to low-Earth orbit. The growth has been remarkable. “The total number of efforts we are tracking… has increased from a mere 31 in 2015 to over 101 in 2018,” he writes.

SpaceX just let people crawl into its new spaceship… SpaceX allowed a few reporters into its Hawthorne, California headquarters on Monday for close-up looks at a new spaceship and spacesuit for NASA astronauts. The aerospace company, founded by tech mogul Elon Musk, built its Crew Dragon hardware as part of the agency's Commercial Crew Program. Boeing also designed a new seven-person space capsule for NASA called the CST-100 Starliner. NASA launched the multibillion-dollar program in 2010 to replace the space shuttle, which the agency retired in July 2011, with privately developed American spacecraft — and stop paying Russia increasing prices to fly astronauts to and from the International Space…

SpaceX is quietly planning Mars-landing missions… SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk, is building a rocket-and-spaceship system to land people on Mars. Musk said he wants to launch the first humans to Mars in 2024, following an uncrewed mission in 2022. As Ars Technica reported, SpaceX held a private "Mars Workshop" with NASA and other experts to draft plans for its Mars landings. Experts say setting up a viable outpost, let alone a colony, on Mars is more daunting than Musk has let on. SpaceX, the aerospace company founded by Elon Musk, held a hush-hush conference in Colorado this week to formulate a plan for landing people…

SpaceX reveals the controls of its Dragon spacecraft… Enlarge / NASA astronaut Mike Hopkins meets with employees at SpaceX on Monday. (credit: SpaceX) HAWTHORNE, Calif.—Across the cavernous rocket factory, the buzz, whirr, and whine of various machinery never ebbed. Even when the president of SpaceX and four blue-suited astronauts strode confidently onto the factory floor Monday afternoon, and took up microphones to address several dozen reporters, the incessant work inside the SpaceX Falcon 9 hatchery continued. On one side of the factory, technicians produced rolls of carbon fiber and built myriad payload fairings, which cannot yet be reused during a launch. To meet its cadence of a launch…